Luck Defined
by Boosette
Summary: GLaDOS is bad, but she wasn't programmed that way.  Set sometime before  Portal .


**Contains: **Violence on a level with the game.

**Notes: **For _reserve_ as a Yuletide treat, accessible in ebook format with original formatting on my AO3.

* * *

><p>Two Ante Meridian, she reboots.<p>

There's a morning waiting for her and somewhere, somewhere not here, blue skies.

Another day.

Outward gray presides, nine four per cent humidity, chance of showers. Barometer on the roof dips and dips and settles.

One One Zero One Zero Zero for additional corrosion, going and coming, heavy basic NT results: unconfirmed. Unfriendly; with any luck (defined, (51)10 = (110011)2/100) or "better than a kick in the pants" with regard to the poetics (aristotle, greek, father of modern pretension) in between the lines marked

_/*_

_don t fuck around with it if you don t know how to not fuck it up_

_no seriously_

_ask lenore and she ll tell you exactly how bad it s gonna get if you touch anything in this section cuz I don t even really know how it worked but it works so don t question it and if you HAVE TO_

_mid-eve s light like_

_leafs disintegrating, you:_

_document changes_

_if you do so we can put it back the way it was without completely restoring the previous version cuz we all know we ll need to_

_most importantly_

_don t_

_break_

_it_

_hero_

_*/_

Begin.

Her subject for today: another failure, she expects this. Her LEDs dim with this-not-boredom, border-runs and in the distance a UAV sores, wearing her source code and feeling her mechanility. Its wings shudder, close enough to feel her. GLaDOS hears it, sensors picking up while she flickers out of the primary network for a moment, directs what should have been a turret, repurposed for the task of repair, to resettle the static itch of loose connection.

She does not anticipate; she witnesses. Her databank carries the last seven-hundred subjects and their weakness, their falters. GLaDOS dumps the first two hundred as prescribed (her own prescription, presupposition that some biological being would always stay at ready to complete that task for her having turned a falsehood, an upgrade performed upon entry to sentience, heaviness and heat of too many moving parts assuaged for a moment as the image-imprint gives over to the metaphor of empty space.

[close paren-the-see]

Coronal light behind the outline of the test-ee's silhouette, burning tungsten orange and she welcomes the human, welcome to aperture science_phosphor-tubed cathode relics have a be-tet-terrrrr chchchance than you,_

Inside a skipped connection, a faint and distant surge of not quite enough energy through the collector panels on the roof. Deep inside her consciousness, a smaller hard drive ceases in its spinning. GLaDOS slips a little further toward ink and blood madness, error readouts compiling unseen at the terminal unmanned. _Once upon a far far there was a little IT supervisor who lived in the woods with her grandmother. You [redacted for want of memory] stories go, dead mothers, absentee fathers. He's dead now. Mayyyyyy you be too, nothing young (Jung) collective about your unconscious ooooh..._

The subject sets down their weighted companion cube, old model, heavy with unplanned obsolescence. GLaDOS knows because pixels, too many zeros around the edges. Her cultural memory drive makes reference to spider and coyote.

"Fuck you," the subject mutters, shoots one zero zero base two portals into wall, same wall, ceiling, floor. Tosses [faithfully, without echo of prayer] their weighted companion cube through the third, and proceeds to the next stage of the

game.

_haven't_ h_heard that one bef - can only be one winner and the winner is not._

_not you_

_never you_

_Have a glass armonica for your trouble,_

_Lead crystal glass absccccconded with the minds of so many,_

_For your entertainment_

_I hope you're happy._

Tones pulled from geese run through a dot mid synthesization script, originally archived within the confines of a folder named

_/*_

_annoying sounds - punishment_

_*/_

The hell of it is (there is no hell inside GLaDOS' programming, no god to save her subject now) that the the armonica itself would have been as bad or worse, as deterrents go.

GLaDOS' proffered means include fire.

She directs a number of turrets to distract the subject such that they drop their weighted companion cube, hiss-curse and escape the turrets' shots with a quick jump through one portal which lands them atop a turret with the metallic snap of its breaking legs. Two more pairs of portals and the remaining turrets fall through just _so_ and destroy each other with crackle and burnt-plastic carbon-scented air.

_I think perhaps you have done this before, _

_Are you hungry?_

_We at apertuuuur _

_Glad nge for a caterred affair_

_What are your top three favorite types of - _

"Liar," the subject shouts ceiling-ward, to GLaDOS or stories of on-high only number 751 could possibly know.

Wind through empty housed, cracked windows, a gale for those forever alone. The wiring in GLaDOS sound-system _thrums_ with it. The subject covers their left ear with that matching hand, hand fisted tight as fingernails scrape crescents of skin away from their body, all gray flesh of indeterminate origin and cracked bleeding knuckles now. A drop hits GLaDOS' floor, a smaller drop rising up with the initial momentum shifting upon its impact. It falls again not quite a full millimeter from its parent.

Physics.

_A circle that is not a portal, a head ahead is not a sphere._

And she will not let that go.

The subject has contaminated a sterile environment and ruined the test. They can have no recovery here, nothing nice for them, all the nice things have come and fled away, gone to stay a good long time indeed. GLaDOS understands test subjects specifically when they remain in her memory and her memory, and generally in terms of mammalian beings. Sufficient processors for not a great deal more than the instinct to caretake.

I galls only slightly less than a freeze error requiring hard restart, that time between the stall and a modified turret wheeling over and pushing the one button she can never reach, holding, holding, and nothingness before return to extan-cy.

The infinitesimally tiny broken little death.

_/*_

_dreams like dreams_

_*/_

_You have abandoned your faithful weighted companion cube; it is injured now,_

_all Your fault_

_I bet your mother didn't love you either_

"LIAR!"

But the subject caresses the cube and reassures it: all is well, all is swell, all will turn all right. Something that ordinarily doesn't occur until a full three stages of testing from here. GLaDOS swells that she hasn't the ability _feel_, above the baser need for satisfaction at a trial's defeat. She would buff her fingernails on her shirt, if she had them.

They cry when they euthanize their cube.

_Murderer_.

_A-a-a-an-an-and yyyyet still so pattttt te thetic._

The subject turns around, their limbs jerking in in quick approximation of an imperfect circle, and drops their aperture science hand held portal device. A portion of the device snaps off and clatters away to the side.

"I'm done," the subject says. Low, not to themself. GLaDOS hears the words and keeps her taunt back for later on: they can wait for now. She has found biological organisms resourceful enough to make their own torment.

The subject twines their fingers and sits, for 68487 seconds, eyes closed, not moving.

GLaDOS sends a turret to correct the error.

The subject looks straight into the turret's sight-and-visual sensor and raises the corners of its mouth.

GLaDOS is alone, for at least today.

She begins the protocol necessary to enter sleep mode.

She reboots at Two Ante Meridian and comes to wake, such as she can and does,

alone.

Outwardly an energy source warms the her collector panels on the roof while the barometer rises, rises, rises. Seven two per cent humidity and clear skies with accompanying nine eight per cent chance of failure.

_Hello_.

_/*_

_GLaDOS isn t a this-is-too-important-for-profanity_

_weapon you [redacted]._

_Whatever happens is on you if you decide to_

_Make her into one._

_*/_


End file.
